NWA-PCUG Newsletter Article, January 2012
Linux Software of the Month: April 2011
By Geof Goodrum,
President, Washington Area Computer User Group, VA
April 2011 issue, The Cursor
http://www.wacug.org
linux(at)wacug.org (click to email author)

The software described below can be downloaded at the links provided or copied onto a USB flash drive at the WAC meeting. However, please check the online package management tool included with your GNU/Linux distribution first, as installation is often just a click away.

Free Pascal – v2.4.2. http://www.freepascal.org/. Modified GNU Library General Public License source code and packages for Debian and RPM-based GNU/Linux distributions by the Free Pascal Development Team. Originally named FPK-Pascal, Free Pascal is a 32 and 64 bit Turbo Pascal and Delphi compatible Pascal programming language compiler for DOS, Linux, Win32, OS/2, FreeBSD, AmigaOS, Mac OS X, Mac OS classic and several other platforms (the number of supported targets grows all the time, although not all of them are on the same level as the main ones). The Free Pascal compiler is available for several architectures, x86, Sparc (v8,v9), ARM, x86_64 (AMD64/Opteron) and Powerpc. An older version (the 1.0 series) also supports m68k.

The compiler is itself written in Pascal and is able to compile its own sources. Hedgewars – v0.9.15. http://www.hedgewars.org/. Free GNU General Public License source code and executable packages for Debian, Ubuntu, Fedora, ArchLinux, and openSuSE Linux by Andrey Korotaev et al. Hedgewars is a turn-based strategy, artillery, action and comedy game, featuring the antics of pink hedgehogs with attitude as they battle from the depths of hell to the depths of space. As commander, it’s your job to assemble your crack team of hedgehog soldiers and bring the war to your enemy.

Features: Hilarious and devastating turn based combat for up to 6 players; Both local and network multiplayer, with optional AI opponents; Battle on an infinite number of randomly generated maps, with over 20 environments; Utilize 47 (and counting) devastating weapons including the piano strike and explosive robotic cake; Play the game your way, with 18 different game modifiers, tweak almost every aspect of the match; Customize your team, with over 120 costumes, 30 graves, 12 forts, 100s of flags and unique voice packs; Huge battles with up to 48 hogs; Play both singleplayer and multiplayer minigames; plugin your own custom maps, costumes, and other artwork.

Requires Qt >= 4.5, FreePascal >= 2.2.4, SDL >= 1.2.5, SDL_net >= 1.2.5, SDL_mixer >= 1.2, SDL_image >= 1.2, SDL_ttf >= 2.0, CMake >= 2.6.0, lua = 5.1.

Linphone – v3.4.3. Fhttp://www.linphone.org/. Free GNU General Public License source code and executable packages for Debian and Ubuntu Linux by Simon Morlat. Linphone is an audio and video Internet phone with GTK+ and console interfaces. It uses the Session Initiation Protocol (SIP), and is compatible with most SIP clients and gateways.

It can use various audio and video codecs such as Speex, GSM, G711, ilbc, amr, Theora, H263-1998, MPEG4, H264, and snow. This version improves Mac OS X integration with desktop menus, better sound system handling, and binary bundle generation for ease of installation. It also improves memory usage and fixes a few SIP bugs.

WordPress – v3.1. http://wordpress.org/. Free GNU General Public License scripts by the WordPress Development Team. WordPress is a software script that, together with PHP v4.3 or greater, MySQL v4.1.2 or greater, and a web server (e.g. Apache; Nginx), provides a point and click menu-driven framework for a standards-compliant, professional looking web site that is easy to maintain with no knowledge of web programming required. WordPress is the most widely used framework for self-hosted blogging web sites, and is highly customizable with thousands of widgets, themes and plug-ins, both free and commercial. New features include the admin bar, which provides easy access to common administrative tasks from the front-end for logged in users; internal linking, which lets you easily search for and link to existing content within your site from within the WYSIWYG editor; a standard set of post formats, enabling the creation of tumblelog-type sites; archive pages for custom post types; advanced taxonomy; and custom field queries.

Kernel Source - v2.6.38. http://www.kernel.org/. Free GNU Public License source code for all platforms by the Linux community.

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